The Good Life

by Marian Thurm

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Stacy said, sounding like some impatient, unappealing seventeen-year-old, albeit one he treasured.

  S

  Stacy lay in bed in a labor room listening to the music flowing from her iPod. She listened to the same three-minute movement from Handel’s Water Music over and over again, a serene, delicate piece simply entitled “Air.” When Roger asked if she was finally ready to move on to the andante movement, she happened to be breathing through a particularly fierce contraction, and yelped, “Stop talking to me, dumbass!” And then, as the contraction ebbed, “Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry, okay?”

  “Listen, you’re entitled to be as mean and bitchy as you want. Tomorrow it’ll all be forgotten. By me, anyway,” Roger said.

  “How is it possible,” Stacy asked in between contractions, “that every child who ever came into this world caused this much pain?”

  Roger shrugged; what, after all, could he possibly say? Still, she wanted him to say something.

  “Honestly, I can’t take too much more of this,” she announced, hating the sound of her own lament. Another contraction built, sweeping her along all the way from discomfort to agony. It hit her that for the first time in her life she actually wanted to die, and that she didn’t have the faith or strength to see past this unbearable moment. “You did this to me!” she yelled. “You, you idiot!”

  “Guilty!” Roger said, and she heard a jaunty note in his voice that infuriated her.

  But then she felt guilty. “Sorry, did I just call you an idiot?”

  “I certainly hope not,” said the labor nurse who’d come to check on Stacy’s progress. “So how are we doing?”

  “We,” Stacy said, panting, “want an epidural.”

  “Too late for that now,” the nurse informed her briskly. “Sorry, but you should have spoken up earlier.”

  “You’re not sorry,” Stacy heard herself say. “Why are you saying you’re sorry when you’re not?” She listened to Roger drawing in his breath.

  “Hey!” Dr. Burnes said, appearing at Stacy’s side in surgical scrubs. “They told you I had to do an emergency C-section on another patient, right? I wish I could have been here sooner.”

  “They told me a lot of things,” Stacy said. “They told me this Lamaze crap would work like a charm, which, under the circumstances, I find pretty hilarious.”

  Rubbing her shoulder, Roger said, “Well, it’s been a long seven hours.” And then, “Hey, look, the sun’s coming up.”

  “Like I give a flying fuck,” Stacy said.

  “Don’t mind me,” Roger said as he walked toward the window for a better look, “I’m just making polite conversation.”

  “Go away, please,” Stacy begged. “All of you go away and leave me alone to die, which is actually my goal right now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m your knight in shining armor,” Dr. Burnes said. She drew a plaid curtain around the two of them and after examining Stacy, said, “Yup, this patient’s on her way to the delivery room even as we speak.”

  “She is?” Stacy said.

  There were, she noticed immediately, remarkably bright lights overhead in the delivery room. Too bright: she had to close her eyes against them.

  Now she could hear Dr. Burnes’s voice commanding, “Bear down! Push!”

  Stacy gave it everything she had as Roger’s hands pressed down on her shoulders.

  She leaned back, drained. “Eulogy or elegy, what’s the difference between them?” she asked Roger, her voice so small and tired even she could barely hear it.

  “You’re not concentrating,” Dr. Burnes said crossly. “You’ve got to help me out here.”

  But Stacy was no slacker; she was pushing as powerfully as she could. Again and again until hours might have passed. She was trapped in this hellish place where there was only appalling pain and loud voices cruelly ordering her to work harder when, honestly, she was more exhausted than she’d ever been in her life; she was half dead, really. And, too, she was certain that if she pushed any harder, she’d explode, and they would be gathering bloody pieces of her from all four corners of this dazzlingly bright room.

  “Again!” Dr. Burnes insisted. “Push against my finger!”

  “Come on, Stacy! Come on, come on, come on!” the nurse said, and Stacy envisioned this hefty middle-aged woman in a cheerleader uniform, pale dimply thighs revealed, the white Air Jordans on her feet even whiter than her thighs.

  “Put down your damn megaphone!” Stacy yelled at her.

  Dr. Burnes was muttering angrily now. “It’s been forty-five minutes, it’s enough.”

  “Don’t be angry at me,” Stacy said.

  “No one’s angry at you, babe,” said Roger. He had no right to look so tired and spent, Stacy thought, not when she was the one who’d been doing all the work.

  “And don’t call me ‘babe,’ ” she told him.

  “Stacy!” Dr. Burnes said sharply. Shining in the fluorescent light was a tool that resembled a pair of tongs, with extra-large spoons at the ends.

  “What the fuck is that?” said Stacy.

  “We’re going to get this baby out with forceps. And no worries, I’m going to be very careful.”

  “Okay.” How meek and innocent she herself sounded, Stacy thought; hers was the voice of a woman you could walk right over. A woman so innocent, you could feed lies to her without her even noticing. But she was not such a woman. “Come over here,” she told Roger. “Where I can see you.”

  “I’m right here,” he said. “We’re going to watch for the baby now.”

  The baby, whom Stacy had forgotten all about. Already she’d proven herself a bad mother, and wanted to weep.

  Something was sliding out from between her legs. Something wet and slippery, grayish-pink and greasy-looking; in truth, it was kind of hideous.

  That’s a baby?

  Well, apparently it was.

  “There’s your daughter!” the doctor announced, all smiles for the very first time, as she held Olivia up for Stacy and Roger’s approval. “Good work, Stacy.”

  Good work! A high school teacher’s enthusiastic scrawl across the top of your AP English essay, calculus quiz, world history exam.

  Olivia let out a small cry of outrage as she was placed on Stacy’s stomach. “You want to go back where you came from, little girl?” Stacy said, and dropped a first kiss on Olivia’s greasy, matted hair. “Oh, and by the way, that’s your old man over there,” she said as Roger lowered his head to kiss them both.

  Hearing this, Olivia whimpered, and closed one blue eye.

  S

  She was a lightweight: five pounds, thirteen ounces, with heartbreakingly spindly arms and legs, the pale hair on her head soft as down.

  “Don’t you just love her?” Roger said.

  Had she already fallen in love with Olivia on this very first day of the baby’s life? It was an unfair question, really, Stacy reflected. Because Olivia was a stranger, wasn’t she, someone Stacy had been introduced to barely twelve hours ago. But she loved the sweet, velvety feel of the baby in her arms, just as Clare had predicted.

  Clare and Marshall were Olivia’s first visitors; as soon as she walked into Stacy’s hospital room, Clare let out a cry at the sight of the baby asleep in her arms.

  “She’s a beauty,” Marshall said kindly.

  Well, to be honest, not exactly, Stacy thought; Olivia’s nose was a little squashed, and there was some bruising on one side between her eyebrow and hairline, thanks to the forceps. Bending her face now, Stacy touched her lips to one of the bruises.

  Isabel, the patient in the other bed, a first-time mother in her forties, was watching Jeopardy! on her TV with her husband. “What is . . . the Spanish Inquisition?” she said.

  “It’s amazing, this fatherhood thing,” Roger told everyone, and deposited Olivia back into her Lucite bassinet next to Stacy’s bed. “There’s nothing like it.”

  “Who is . . . Albert Speer?” Isabel called out excitedly.
>
  Marshall sighed. “Did I mention my BlackBerry has a cracked screen?” he said.

  “What happened?” Stacy asked him.

  “Oh, the usual—your sister-in-law flung it onto the floor of the terrace in a moment of unchecked rage,” Marshall said.

  “Ha ha,” said Clare.

  “Who is . . . Benito Mussolini?” said Isabel. She and her husband high-fived each other.

  “Seriously,” Marshall said. “I dropped the BlackBerry on the bathroom floor. And that’s marble we’re talking about.”

  “I just heard on the news that 67 percent of all people surveyed admitted to texting while in the bathroom,” Roger said.

  “Yeah, but how big was the survey?”

  Stacy’s eyes were closing and she was about to doze off. When she awoke, twenty minutes later, she heard Clare say, “You want perfect happiness for them, perfect contentment, but trust me, even when they’re babies it’s not always a possibility.”

  S

  Waiting for Roger and Clare to swing by the hospital and pick her up for the crosstown trip home, Stacy sat at the edge of her bed eyeing the baby, and had to acknowledge that beyond holding Olivia and feeding her those four-ounce bottles of formula every few hours, she’d done very little for her daughter. She had yet to change a diaper, to get Olivia in and out of the plain white hospital-issue Onesies the nurses had dressed her in. Several of the nurses had offered Stacy the opportunity to do these things on her own, but she’d decided to pass, claiming exhaustion, and a soreness everywhere that made her dread the mere act of getting up and moving around the room.

  So what was it, exactly, that she was so afraid of? Snapping Olivia’s fragile arms as she tried to slip them into the sleeves of her shirt. Taping her diaper too loosely or too tightly or backward or upside down. Handling her too roughly, or even too gently. Roger shared her fears; the two of them were kind of pathetic, she thought, a couple of bewildered amateurs who had about three minutes to get their act together before taking the baby home with them.

  When Clare finally showed up, half an hour late, she explained that the traffic coming from the West Side had been terrible, and that Roger was downstairs in an illegal parking spot. “But why isn’t this baby dressed and ready to go?” she asked, laughing when she heard Stacy’s excuses. “Oh, honestly, don’t be such a coward!” she said, and went into the bathroom to wash her hands before she touched the baby.

  Stacy stood by helplessly as Clare took over, dressing Olivia in a pink terrycloth Onesies, punctuating her movements with silly, singsongy murmurs of “this little arm in this little sleeve, this little arm in this little sleeve.”

  Riding in the wheelchair the hospital insisted she use for transportation to the lobby, Stacy felt self-conscious and foolish, as if everyone who passed her in the hallways knew that she was fully capable of walking out on her own. She kept her head down to avoid their gazes.

  Outside in the hospital’s circular driveway, Clare arranged herself next to Roger in the front seat of the BMW; Stacy sat in back, watching over the baby in her rear-facing infant safety seat. As they drove through the park, heading back to the West Side, Olivia began to cry. “She’s probably hungry,” Stacy said, though without much confidence. “Or maybe she’s wet. What do I know?”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Clare told her, “trust me.”

  Stacy slipped the tip of her pinky into the baby’s mouth and watched as Olivia sucked on it greedily. No longer crying, she stared at Stacy with her unblinking, slate-blue eyes. For her the world hadn’t yet come into focus, and everything she saw was in basic black and white. If only it were that simple for her, Stacy thought; if only she could see black and white everywhere she looked.

  At home, walking past the doorman, Olivia in her arms, she tried her best to look like someone who knew what the hell she was doing.

  The front door of their apartment was decorated with a glossy pink bow stapled to a piece of copy paper that said “WELCOME HOME, GIRLS!” in Roger’s cramped, sloppy script, and Stacy found herself choked up at the sight of it.

  Embarrassed by her own sentimentality, she felt a need to apologize. “Dumb, stupid hormones!” she said, shaking her head.

  Instead of going directly to the baby’s room, she carried Olivia into the master bedroom, and lowered her onto the vast, king-size bed. As Roger and his sister looked on, she held her breath and eased one marble-smooth leg, then the other, out from the Onesies.

  She put Olivia’s sweet-smelling foot in her palm, and silently marveled at its perfect, doll-like beauty.

  S

  He remembers, from his childhood, a cartoon he’d seen on television only once, though for years he’d kept hoping to discover it again. Its tone was surprisingly dark and melancholy, as were its colors, the darkest browns and grays and greens. In the cartoon’s narrative, a little boy was desperate to find the beloved pocketknife he’d carelessly lost near the creek behind his home. Observing the child’s misery, his pet goldfish, large and friendly and eager to help, sprang from its bowl, and suddenly blessed with the power of speech, announced that they would travel together on the ocean to someplace the boy needed to see. They sailed along in a glass-bottomed boat until the fish said, “Right here—look!” Through the floor of the boat the boy could see his pocketknife at the bottom of the ocean. Not only his knife, but dolls and toy soldiers, rings of keys, quarters and dimes—everything that had ever been lost by a child. It was the place where all lost things came to rest, and the boy was supposed to take comfort in the very notion of it. Instead he wept, wanting to rescue the knife he could see so vividly through the water, an ugly dark swirl of colors that was somehow perfectly transparent. But, as the fish patiently explained, once something was sent down there, it had to stay forever.

  Why not, Roger thinks now, why not just empty himself of everything he wants to lose, every bleak, oppressive thought, and let it all rest where it can’t possibly be retrieved, at the bottom of an imaginary ocean.

  ~ 19 ~

  When Stacy and Roger moved to their new apartment on the Upper East Side, Will was barely a month old and Olivia had just turned two. It meant nothing to a two-year-old, of course, but Stacy couldn’t resist pointing out to her daughter—in the cab ride to Park Avenue the day of the move—the hospital where Stacy herself and Roger were born, and whose rooftop Olivia would see from the window of her new bedroom. Their apartment on the West Side had been more than comfortable and Stacy would have happily raised her children there, but Roger had other ideas: their new home, in a Park Avenue high-rise, was house-sized at well over three thousand square feet—a three-bedroom condo with an eat-in kitchen, a quartet of marble bathrooms, and generous views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline from nearly every room. And, too, it had central air-conditioning, and its own washer and dryer, a necessity for Stacy, since she had, by choice, no housekeeper to help her, and, with an infant and a toddler, more laundry to take care of than she could ever have imagined. The apartment was considerably larger than the house she had grown up in, and considerably more luxurious. She hadn’t worked with the homeless in the two years since Olivia was born, and Stacy was, from time to time, plagued by feelings of guilt about both her departure from that world and also her good fortune, and she instinctively reached into her wallet in search of a twenty-dollar bill for any homeless person she happened to encounter loitering outside in front of her neighborhood subway station on Lexington Avenue.

  Whenever her sister came to visit with the twins, who were now ten years old (and, shockingly, already interested in makeup and fashion), Stacy tried to downplay the views of the Empire State Building from her twenty-seventh floor windows, the custom-made cabinetry in the kitchen, the heated bathroom floors. The first time Lauren saw the apartment, she came without Chuck, and murmured to Stacy, “Whoa, Roger must really be raking in the big bucks from those shopping malls!”

  “I guess,” Stacy had said with a shrug, because this kind of talk would always ma
ke her uncomfortable. And, too, in the five years since her wedding, she’d kept her distance from the financial aspects of their marriage; there was always more than enough in their checking and savings accounts, and that, for her, was pretty much all the information she needed. Though she knew, too, that this willful ignorance might come back to haunt her someday, for the moment, she thought, it was all fine.

  Her sister looked at her sharply. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Stace, and it’s not a criticism, just an observation, but honestly, I don’t think you realize how lucky you are.”

  “No, no, of course I do,” Stacy said, and could feel herself blushing. In the few months they’d been living here in the new apartment, she had never felt entirely at ease and worried that she never would—worried that, instead, she would continue to feel out of place. Who, after all, really needed four bathrooms? And doormen who would deliver your mail directly to your door. And carry even the skimpiest bag of groceries to your apartment for you, even if you tried to explain that it simply wasn’t necessary—tried to explain that the truth was, these services rendered made you feel foolish and spoiled. She just didn’t feel entitled to any of it and only wished there were a way of explaining this to Roger that wouldn’t make her sound ungrateful.

  “Of course I realize how fortunate I am,” she repeated to her sister. She thought, at that moment, of going back to work for a nonprofit, of getting out there again in the world of the disenfranchised and putting both her heart and soul into the sort of work that, according to Roger, most people wouldn’t dream of embracing. (The sort of work, he’d told her when they first met, that he couldn’t help but admire her for doing.) As if the baby heard what she was contemplating—if only momentarily—Will began to shriek from his bassinet, and it was that urgent newborn wail that went right through you, yanking you from your deepest thoughts, the deepest sleep. It was an alarm that could not be ignored, and it went off many times, both day and night. There was also Olivia, still a baby herself, even though she could identify all the letters of the alphabet and could type her name on Stacy’s laptop. And had recently taken to cheerfully asking, “What’s your password?” to strangers in the supermarket.